Joe Pass: Acoustic Blues

[gravyTrain]

Here is a fun little exercise:

I have been spending more, and more time sifting through the many solo pieces Joe Pass shared with us. One of the most remarkable (in my opinion) is 'Acoustic Blues' from Virtuoso #4 album.

Discuss this song.... heard it? Love it, or hate it? Observations? What can we learn from this piece?

[Lynton]

Joe did some increbible things in his life. Check out his work with Ella...Easy Living is a good place to start. Joe and Ella are probably still doing gigs together in the next world.

[derek]

gravy, haven't seen you here in a while. Good to see you back. Listening to Acoustic Blues now. Nothing remarkable about it to me, other than the normal brilliance of JP.

He switches back and forth effortlessly between single lines and chords, basslines, has solid time, treats the tune differently each time he repeats it. All those things I hear Joe doing when he plays solo. Joe is my favorite player ever, so for me it is great.

Did you have something specific in mind?

[gravyTrain]

Originally Posted by Lynton

Joe did some increbible things in his life. Check out his work with Ella...Easy Living is a good place to start. Joe and Ella are probably still doing gigs together in the next world.

Amen to that -- I love their rendition of Cry Me a River.

--------

Originally Posted by derek

Did you have something specific in mind?

I hardly know where to start

I suppose I find it particularly amazing that what he is playing is predominantly improvisation, yet he manages to keep the flow going nicely without many missed ('wrong') notes.

One of his mantras was that if you play a wrong note, make it right with the notes that follow; this is something I am beginning to get a grip on after spending enough time with his music. On some of his songs, if you to listen to them enough times and listen close enough, you can hear him implement that philosophy with brilliant effect (Blues for Alican is one of my favorites).

Also, maybe it's just my imagination, but he really seems to favor the use of 13th chords when he slows down. FWIW the 13th is a really beautiful chord.

[Goofsus4]

I'm listening to some Joe Pass recordings and an instructional CD right now. As I'm still new to jazz, I'm trying to figure out what artists that resonate with my way of thinking and playing, so I can try to learn something from them. One thing I really like about Joe's style is that it is very melodic. I find that when I try to play a lot of "licks" that they don't really sound that great on a stand alone basis (without accompaniment). This is very important to me, because that is along the lines of the style I am cultivating. I want my lines, whenever possible, to be taken out of the context of the music and still sound musical alone. Joe's lines are very inspiring. I find myself working through one of this lines, then being inspired to customize it and have it lead into other phrases that I think up. I think that happens because his lines are so musical by nature. I also like his way of thinking - trying to reduce the complexity of the theory to things you can actually use while playing. I know like so many before him in all disciplines, he's standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. But, I really do like his style and approach to playing.

[derek]

I have a very simplistic view as to why Joe sounds more melodic than other players. Part of it is because he learned countless melodies as he was coming up. The story he told was his dad would hear a jingle on the radio and tell Joe to cop it. This was an important aspect, as was learning the heads of hundreds of tunes. There are some great melodies in those old tunes, and after learning so many, I believe you being to internalize some of those intervals and other aspects of melody.

The other big reason I think Joe sounds the way he does, is he strips pretty much everything down to a V I cadence. Since the V creates the most tension, he was tension/release, etc. When confronted with a ii V I, Joe played V chord ideas over both the ii (which is the V of the V) and the V, resolving into the I.

Pat Martino takes the opposite approach, and playes ii ideas over both the ii and V. Pat is about converting everything to minor. Pat's sound is more modern and angular. Again, this is a pretty simplistic viewpoint, but I do think it goes a long way in explaining why Joe sounded so melodic.

[m78w]

Another cool thing to think about when discussing Joe's lines, he sounds so good playing them because he invented them! We sometimes hear players no a days playing "lines and licks" and sounding out of place, or sound like the ideas are forced, but with Joe all of his material is full of vocabulary and lines/licks but they sound so good because he was able to just whip them up on the spot.

What a genius.

MW

[jazzalta]

What really helped me was when Joe said he tended to reduce his improvizational thinking down to major, minor and dominant.

[Goofsus4]

Yes, I got some mileage out of the major, minor, dom thing too. But, you really have to know your intervals to employ any of that. If you look at his lines, it's not as if he ignores the other intervals. If he plays a line over C11, he's got the 11 in there. He's playing all the tensions over altered doms, etc. I've been focusing on really learning intervals recently just so I can do exactly what he's talking about - stop thinking about scales and playing this over that, and just look at a Dm7b5 simply as a D minor 7th arp and flat the 5th interval when I play it. It takes a bit of practice to think that way, but from what I can tell, it takes less time to do learn to do that than it does to learn all these exotic scales and then try to think about when and how to use them. I read all the time about, "oh and this is such and such minor triad over the Major 7, so you get this these tensions" and I think, "why not just play a Major 7 scale and just flat/sharp the 9ths and the 5ths however you like it. Overtime, you are going to end up learning the superlocrian scale anyway, it's just that you won't think of it as learning the superlocrian scale. It will just be playing tensions you want over the dom 7 chord, or whatever. I'm rambling, I know, but I think this seems to form the conceptual basis of Joe's approach based on what I hear him say.